Slim, quiet, and wearing a pair of thick glasses, Quoc Le does not strike you as someone who is leading a revolution in the AI field.

In 2011, Le co-founded Google Brain, together with his Ph.D. advisor Andrew Ng, Google Fellow Jeff Dean and Google Researcher Greg Corrado. The goal was exploring deep learning in the context of Google’s gigantic data. Before that, Le has done some pioneering work at Stanford on unsupervised deep learning.

Language understanding has so far been the privilege of humans. That is why studying natural language processing (NLP) promises huge potential for approaching the holy grail of artificial general intelligence (A.G.I). Many researchers dive into the field of NLP — machine translation, question and answering, reading comprehension, natural conversations, and on and on.

Shining a spotlight on the latest research progress of language understanding, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference this year honored Know What You Don’t Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD as its best short paper. SQuAD, which stands for Stanford Question Answering Dataset, is recognized as the best reading comprehension dataset. It spawns some of the latest models achieving human-level accuracy in the task of question answering.